


Downbeat

by Sholio



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Exhaustion, Female Character of Color, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Magic Healing, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 11:05:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19789582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: If the Defenders had been there for the big fight in Endgame -- after the battle, regrouping and recovering.





	Downbeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maidenjedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/gifts).



Victory comes not in a rush but in a slow winding down, in a struggle to rescue civilians from flooded farmhouses and crashed vehicles, in wounds to tend to, and friends long thought lost to be hugged and scolded and hugged again.

The world feels fresh and new, even when the immediate and nearby part of the world is a broad scar of devastation slashing across a large part of upstate New York. 

And it's evening, beautiful and gold, when Misty finds herself sitting on a somehow-intact dock beside a lake that has spilled beyond its borders and turned the surrounding battlefield to marsh. The water is beautiful in the evening light, gold as molten metal, and she hurts in the arm she doesn't have. She reaches to rub at the contacts between prosthetic and flesh, then pulls and twists and takes it off. If she needs it for anything tonight ... hell, she'll put it back on.

She met a young lady earlier on this long, long day, a young lady in armor, who looked critically at her prosthetic and said, "Talk to me after. I'll make you a better one." Misty had smiled and nodded and gone on, and it wasn't until later that someone told her that was the Princess of Wakanda.

It's a whole new world.

She's sitting with the sun in her eyes and the prosthetic across her knees, gently rubbing at the abraded stump, when Colleen drops down beside her with a thump and a rattle of the katana in its sheath and a smell of smoke and mud. Colleen bumps her shoulder against Misty's good one. Misty leans against her a little.

"Seen the others?" Misty asks.

Colleen smiles. She looks as tired as Misty feels. There's a half-healed bruise above her left eye, a stiffness to the way she moves. "Luke and Danny are planning some kind of bonfire, last I heard, and inviting everyone in sight. Jessica and the lady with the flying horse are bringing the booze."

"How do they have _energy,_ " Misty sighs.

"No idea. Hey." Colleen holds up her Iron Fist hand, gestures to the shoulder Misty is still idly rubbing. "Want me to?"

"You got the juice for it?"

Colleen nods, so Misty turns her torso and Colleen lays a hand lightly on the stump. Light gleams through Colleen's sleeve, and for all she's seen -- for all she's seen _today_ \-- Misty thinks that she'll never get tired of this, and she hopes the wonder never goes out of it.

It's not the first time Colleen has healed her, so she's prepared for the warm feeling, like a gentle heat soaking into her tired, strained muscles and soothing away the aftereffects of this endless day. Misty never even noticed the headache pounding at her temples until it's suddenly less, downgraded from a dry ache behind her eyes to something distant and more like fatigue.

Colleen drops her hand away and lets out a soft sigh. Misty catches her, one-armed, as Colleen sways.

"Don't overdo it there, sister."

Colleen smiles a little, and leans on her and doesn't say anything for awhile. They sit on the dock and look at the lake. High overhead, something streaks past, glowing brilliantly -- a spaceship, or a person; could be either, and Misty still wonders how in the world this is her _life._

"Hey," Colleen says suddenly, sounding sleepy. She lifts her head off Misty's shoulder. "Were you ... there? Back in '12. The Battle of New York."

Misty glances at her friend, and it's a funny thing, she thinks -- they've known each other this long, and neither of them has ever asked that question. They've never talked about it. It's one of those things like going off to fight in some foreign war, like living through a bombing. It's just there, underneath everything you do after.

"I was a cop," she says slowly, and sees Colleen wince. She shakes her head and bumps against Colleen's shoulder. "No, it's okay. Yeah, I lost friends that day. I saw ... stuff. But I wasn't where everything was going down. I was uptown. Most of what I had to deal with was panicked crowds and people worried about their loved ones."

It feels like a long time ago, now. She thinks about herself on that day, watching the explosions above the city, the rain of fire, the superheroes. But the thing she remembers most is how it impressed on her how interconnected the city really was, and is. New Yorkers tend to think of the city in terms of neighborhoods and not as a whole. Misty knows people who have lived in Harlem for a lifetime and have never been to Brooklyn or Queens or the Empire State Building. But then you have something like that happen, and you see people shocked and crying not because their neighborhood is in danger, but because skyscrapers are falling somewhere else. Because they can't get through to their family and friends in the East Village or Little Italy or Chinatown. Because their city is wounded and they feel it.

And today makes her think about how the whole world is like that. The whole galaxy, maybe. She's met _aliens_ today. In the future, she's going to look up at the stars and think about that sweet kid with the insect eyes and the lady with two glowing fists to Colleen's one. Think about them living their lives beyond her sky.

"What about you?" she asks belatedly, realizing that she's been quiet for awhile and Colleen is slumping on her wearily, with no way to know where her thoughts have gone. Colleen might think Misty is dwelling on the hurts and losses of the past, but that's not really what she's thinking about. Ten-years-younger Officer Knight, with two good arms, who had never heard of the Hero of Harlem or the Devil of Hell's Kitchen or the Barefoot Billionaire, couldn't even have imagined what was out here waiting for her.

"I was still with Bakuto's dojo." Colleen pulls up her legs and rests her arm loosely across her knees. She's warm against Misty's side in the growing chill of the evening. "We worked to help people who had been left homeless by the fighting. A lot of the students invited people to stay there. We had people ... refugees ... bedded down all over the whole complex, in the gardens. I ..." She raises a hand to her face. "I still look back on things like that and think, no matter what he turned out to be, what _they_ turned out to be, we did some good."

"Nothing's really all good or all bad. Hell, girl, I've spent most of my adult life working for the NYPD. You think I don't know that?"

The edge of Colleen's smile is gilded by the setting sun. Instead of answering, she points. "Look."

There's a pegasus skimming across the lake, its wings afire in the evening light. The figure on its back can just be glimpsed, leaning low across the froth of its mane, holding a keg on the pegasus's creamy hip. Flying horse and rider circle over the dock, dipping a wing like an old-fashioned barnstormer plane, then glide down onto the lawn of the big lake house sitting at the top of a low hill overlooking the lake, with its few remaining windows catching the sunset's fire.

Misty twists around to look, and beside her, she feels Colleen doing the same. From down here they can see the Valkyrie handing a keg off to Luke's broad-shouldered figure, who hefts it effortlessly. Misty catches herself smiling, especially when she glimpses Matt on the porch with someone who might be Elektra. There's nothing like the invasion of a genocidal alien maniac, nothing like losing and regaining most of the people you know and love, to put things in perspective.

"Think she'd give us a ride on that thing if we asked?" Colleen asks, and there's a wistfulness in her voice that makes her sound twelve years old, nothing like the full-grown black-belt and warrior who fought side by side with Misty today.

"Won't ever know if you don't ask."

"You know what?" Colleen scrambles to her feet. She shakes out the fingers of her Iron Fist hand idly, as if they're numb. "I think I'm gonna do that. Want to come?"

Misty laughs. "Are you nuts?"

"C'mon. You don't want to ride a pegasus?"

"The A train at rush hour is plenty for me, thanks."

Colleen looks down at her and shakes her head with mock sadness. "You just don't know how to live."

"Living is exactly why I don't want to go flying on a critter with no seat belts, flown by a pilot with no license who's currently supplying a kegger."

Colleen's teeth flash in a quick grin, and then she turns and walks, and then trots, up the hill toward the pegasus cropping grass in the fading red-gold sunset light.

Misty grins after her, and then she stiffly finds her way to her feet, and picks up the prosthetic. Riding a pegasus. All she really wants to do is find their friends, and have Danny hug her (again; he's been hugging everybody, a lot), and have Luke hand her a beer and sit beside the fire they're building up there and listen to Matt complain about the legal implications of what some people are already calling the Unvanishing and Jessica complain about everything.

And maybe later she'll find that kid who mentioned making her a better prosthesis and talk to her about it, and maybe see if she can get that kid hooked up with Danny Rand, because she'd like to find out what Wakandan tech and Rand's pharmaceuticals division and business contacts, plus a pair of wide-eyed idealists, can do together.

But right now she's content to sit in the company of good friends and just ... be. For a while.


End file.
